The last couple of years, Sabzian celebrated its birthday around Valentine’s Day. From this year on, this festive night will be given a different form. By analogy with similar initiatives in other art forms, Sabzian creates a new yearly tradition: Sabzian invites a guest to write a State of Cinema and to choose a film that connects to it. This way, once a year, the art of film is held against the light: a speech that challenges cinema, calls it to account, points the way or refuses to define it, puts it to the test and on the line, summons or embraces it, praises or curses it. A plea, a declaration, a manifest, a programme, a testimony, a letter, an apologia or maybe even an indictment. In any case, a call to think about what cinema means, could mean or should mean today.

For the first edition, the State of Cinema of 2018, Sabzian is honoured to welcome filmmaker Sarah Vanagt. She has chosen Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by F.W. Murnau. The film will be accompanied by musician Seppe Gebruers.

This evening is a collaboration between Sabzian and Cinema Galeries. You can find more information on the event here.

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“Grands travaux might be considered a tentative cartography of the vocational school Anneessens-Funck. We mapped the various spaces of a place where the fragments of a disintegrated city converge. Just like with Because We Are Visual and Rain, constructing Grands travaux was closely related to a tension between inside and outside, between private and public space, between darkness and light... Essentially, Grands travaux is about how we might create new spaces in film. It’s a flowing geography, a movement through the polymorphous spaces inhabited by the boys.”

And with this increased sensitivity, our thinking is reinforced in turn. The cinema’s darkness as an immeasurable greenhouse. When leaving this ‘tropic’ cinema experience – outside in the real world – there is an undeniable awareness, impossible to specify: something has turned, twisted; something has shifted.